


Just Like How You Read About

by AnnetheCatDetective



Series: Nightmares and Dreamscapes [4]
Category: Transylvania 6-5000 (1985)
Genre: Determining How Long You've Been Dating Your Boyfriend, Guilt, Late Night Conversations, M/M, Musical References, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:15:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23803732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: Jack comes home with a surplus of emotions. Gil isn't quite awake enough for any of it... but he's not too asleep for all of it.
Relationships: Jack Harrison/Gil Turner
Series: Nightmares and Dreamscapes [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1802674
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Just Like How You Read About

It’s been six years-- seven years. It’s been seven years, since Jack pulled his head out of his ass, since he promised Gil all of him, since he apologized for all the years wasted and all the pain caused, it’s been seven years…

Seven years, and he still works at Sensation!, which is not great, but… Gil is great. Gil is Gil, unchanged-- except happier. He’s happier. They’re happier. He still works at Sensation!, but he also writes for a real paper, a small paper, doing theatre reviews. Which… okay, so it’s not investigative journalism. But the paper he writes occasional reviews for actually _does_ investigative journalism. It’s something. It keeps him sane.

Seven years, and when he comes home, Gil has waited up, and he looks at him standing there, and he could weep. Gil, barefoot, his sleeves rolled up and his tie loose, why is he still wearing his tie? Takeout container in one hand, he bends to set it on the coffee table.

“How was the--” Gil yawns. “How was the show?”

“I love you.”

He smiles-- surprised, pleased. “I love you, too. Leftovers?”

Jack shakes his head, moving to him, gathering him into an embrace and resting his head down at Gil’s shoulder. He moves him back to the sofa, he ends up in his lap-- where he can’t contort to comfortably rest on his shoulder any longer, but he can pull Gil to his. 

“I love you… I don’t deserve you, but I love you.”

“All I did was offer you some leftovers.” Gil says. Leftovers he’d gotten back out because he’d thought it might wake him up to pick at them and he’d been too tired to make the theatre, but he hadn’t wanted Jack to come home to a dark, quiet apartment. He doesn’t say as much, but Jack knows. He tells him not to wait up every time he’s going to be out late without him, Gil always waits up.

Sometimes he finds him asleep on the couch, and a thirty-seven year old man shouldn’t look so cute. Almost thirty-eight. Which is almost forty.

“How long do you think we’ve been together?”

“Oh… I guess… twenty-one years? Not uninterrupted, I guess we really only… I guess seventeen. That we’ve lived together. Why?”

“Because I… Because I’d have said seven. Because I’d have said we’ve been a couple for seven years, even though we’ve been… Because I realized maybe we count it differently. And seven years isn’t enough. So if you had a better number, I would like to agree with you. You’ve got three _times_ what I do, and I want that. Except…”

“Except what?”

“Except then I have to admit I spent fourteen years being a selfish lover, who wanted it both ways, who jerked you around, who was mean to you.”

“Jack…” Gil sighs, hand sliding up under the back of his jacket, to rub at his back, and Jack can’t relax, not really, but he appreciates it still. “We’ve had this talk, haven’t we? A long time ago.”

“A third of the way back into our relationship. Two thirds of how much of an asshole I am.”

“You’re not.”

“I was.”

Gil kisses him. “I love you. And I know you. And I forgive you. I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

“Neither do I.”

“How was the show?”

“Sad. I’m just sorry. I’m just sorry for fourteen years.” Fourteen years of ‘Gil, don’t be so stupid’, of ‘Gil, you asshole’, ‘Gil, I don’t want you here’. Fourteen years of ‘don’t touch me’, fourteen years of ‘don’t love me’, fourteen years of pushing and pushing and pushing him away. And yet… “I’m not sorry I’m the only man you’ve ever loved.”

“Neither am I.” Gil’s fingers wander through his hair, he kisses him again. He is, somehow, real. He is, somehow, in love with him. He is, somehow, a wonderful living person who exists in the world and lives in his apartment and hangs up his clean laundry.

He hangs up his clean laundry, and he dusts and takes it in turn to scrub the bathroom, and he keeps a memo pad beside the telephone and if he takes notes they’re always neat and organized. He buys too many kitchen towels, almost more than they have room for, and covers for the throw pillows in the living room, and he made the curtains in the kitchen, the _weird_ curtains with the nautical motifs over blue and white polka dots, that Jack loves wholeheartedly. 

“I’m sorry you didn’t like the play.” Gil adds. “Though I guess it’s fine I missed it.”

“You wouldn’t have liked it.” He nods, although he might have, some. Not… Gil is sensitive, not just with theatre, even with movies, he gets into it and it’s all too real for him, and the emotions hit him hard. He prefers _not_ to go to shows that end in tragedy, and he gets emotional about the funniest things sometimes, so something like this… Gil had cried at Little Shop of Horrors, how much more something _real_? Actually, he thinks Gil cried more about Little Shop of Horrors than he did about Miss Saigon, so who knows-- except this one, which he knows he’d have found unbearably sad, and probably for all the wrong reasons.

“What was it about?”

“A man.” Jack sighs, and he leaves Gil’s lap so that he can lay his head there, feet dangling off the couch as he tries to get comfortable-- aware that if he puts his shoes on their couch, Gil will complain. “A lot… uh, a lot like me. A lot less lucky. Only a little less deserving. Whatever ‘deserving’ means. The, uh, kind of man who doesn’t deserve to get everything he wants, but he, he doesn’t deserve to... _lose_ it, either, I guess.”

“I think you deserve the things you want.” 

Gil has a way of cutting through things. Not out in the world, no-- but at home with Jack. He filters out all the bullshit and he grabs the one thing. Sometimes Jack couldn’t say what the one thing is, until Gil catches it, and makes him look at it. Though he has a long history of not looking at it, when Gil does… he’s pushed a lot of deep truths aside.

He wraps a hand around Gil’s knee. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Don’t give me that crap. I’m too tired.” Gil doesn’t quite whine, but he kind of sort of whines, and his fingers are back in Jack’s hair. “You know why I love you. You know who you are. You’re a good man, Jack Harrison.”

“Maybe. But I wasn’t always.”

“You were.” He flicks Jack’s ear, before returning to the scalp massage. “You care so much about truth, and you care so much about justice, and you care so much about people in pain… and you cared about those things your whole life.”

Jack snorts. “Especially people who care about strangers, who care about evil, and social injustice… Do you only care about the bleeding crowd? How about a needing friend…”

He turns his head, kisses Gil’s thigh.

“You know I’m hung up on you… easy to give in. Easy to help out…” Gil sings back this time. He drops a line. Whether it’s memory or omission, Jack isn’t sure. “We saw that one, the movie, didn’t we? I liked that song. And you were singing ‘White Boys’ for a week. And my dad asked if people weren’t done with ‘that hippie crap’. And… I forget. I remember I was at dinner with my parents, and my grandmother, and all I could think about was that two days ago I went to the movies with you. And I touched your hand during one of the songs. Didn’t even hold it, touched it. And I wanted to tell them I was in love with a good man who believed in things.”

“That was seventy-nine, I definitely, I definitely didn’t deserve your love then.”

“You wanted to change the world… it thrilled me.”

“Thrilled you?”

“I was never like you. I was… raised to a purpose and I never questioned it. Of course you thrilled me.”

“Oh, uh, _I_ thrilled you?”

“That and you had a great body.”

Jack laughs. “I did, huh?”

“The unfair thing is that it’s better now than it was then. You’re almost forty, you know, not to call you an asshole, but forty year old journalists aren’t allowed to have bodies like yours. It makes the rest of us look like real slobs, Jack.”

“You’ll hit forty before I do, and you don’t hear me complaining about how you’re so damn beautiful it should be illegal.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere.”

“You and I both know that’s not true.” Jack grins-- it’s brief, but it’s something. A little light lit in him again after a draining evening of theatre. A play for which his review will be very good, actually. A lot of people put a lot of work into making something honest and emotional and it’s not their fault that they managed to hit every single one of Jack’s regrets, flaws, fears, and neuroses. 

Well, okay, there was nothing in the play about loathing your day job working for your de facto father in law at a lousy tabloid, that would have been suspiciously on the nose. He’d have had to get weird and paranoid and ask why a playwright had him under surveillance, or something crazy like that. And Gil would have supported him in that wild flight of fancy, even though if they’d really had Jack under surveillance, they’d have written a character more like Gil.

“There was a song.” He says after a long silence, and he feels Gil jerk back to wakefulness. “In the show. There was a song. It could have been about you. If I could write a song, I mean. So I mean I didn’t hate it. Just a little…”

“Close to home?”

They always hit close to home. ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ and ‘I’ve Never Been in Love Before’ and ‘Love, Look Away’ and ‘Hernando’s Hideaway’ and ‘We Kiss in a Shadow’ and ‘Do You Love Me?’, they always, _always_ hit close to home. He could see them in every show, in every pining lover and in a hundred triumphant duets. 

He’s just always had to choose which one of them was the girl, before. Usually himself, unless some line made it obvious it was the other way around. There’s just always that moment where the song says ‘she’ and Jack thinks ‘he’ and something sours. Which he supposes is why he finds it easier to cast himself as a leading lady, who at least gets to sing about a man. He supposes it’s why Gil has boxes of records of lovelorn women. You can sing along and the pronouns are right.

He had sat in the dark in tears over ‘I love him’. Which he might have been even if he hadn’t seen so much of himself. Just to see one part of himself might have been enough. Just to see what might be the best part of himself, for all he’s railed against it.

Theatre is a mirror, and for the first time in his life, he could see that part of himself reflected back and it had turned him inside out and he’d wished, very briefly, that Gil had come, and then been glad he had not. 

Theatre is a mirror, and it had reflected back the best thing about him and every single ugly one, and a couple of fears he can admit are unrealistic but which had been the source of vivid nightmares just the same. 

“Jack?” Gil prompts, when he falls silent too long. 

“I’m just… glad.”

“You don’t sound glad.”

“That you’re mine. Only mine. That whatever you see in me that’s worth everything I put you through--”

“Mm-hm, well I’ve told you what I see in you.”

He smiles. Kisses Gil’s thigh again. “That you’ve always been only mine. Baby, baby, it’s a wild world… Maybe I was an asshole, but there are worse things out there.”

“I know.”

And Gil… naive, obliging Gil. Well… he has his moments, as far as being un-obliging, but not so much Jack wouldn’t worry about him, if he were unattached, if he were out in the world… if men were allowed to flirt. 

Men have flirted. Gil had arranged that weekend on Fire Island, once. Under the guise of checking out a haunting, which somehow Mac had bought, and Jack had let Gil make up a story without fighting about it. In part because he’s felt less like fighting these past seven years, in part because they had a weekend to spend flaunting each other. Going out dancing just like other couples. Strolling along the beach under the stars, his jacket around Gil’s shoulders, sand cool under bare feet. A place where it was safe to be the Jack he’d always been afraid of being.

When women flirted with Gil, it was… funny, which maybe also makes him an asshole, but if Gil needed him to step in, he’d stop laughing and step in. He’s just so baldly uninterested, and yet they love him. Women have been going crazy over Gil since college-- not many at once, true, but the scattered few very fervent cases. 

When men flirted with him, it… it wasn’t even jealousy, it was _panic_. It was like seeing a man put a hand on Gil’s arm set a wild bird loose inside Jack’s chest, wings hammering at his ribs. He hadn’t worried about Gil’s devotion, but still… the sight of strange men, forward men, being forward with Gil, it sidled up to some unexplored fear and set it off like fireworks. Something massive he refused to put words to, though it wasn’t new. A fear that nestled itself up under his ribcage on a May morning eleven years ago, and by the time he could talk to himself rationally about how unfounded and ridiculous it was, it was a part of him.

By the time he could tell himself he was being ridiculous and had nothing to be afraid of, he’d handled everything wrong, committed himself to doing every little thing wrong. Hurt them both all over again. Spent four years driving a wedge between them when he should have done the opposite. If he’d been smart… 

Which all comes back around to being grateful that Gil is Gil is Gil is Gil is his. Yes, he’s hurt him… but at least no one else has. It’s not much to be grateful for. It’s everything to be grateful for.

He’s had seven years to ask what he’s done to deserve this, and the answer is… he hasn’t. But that’s all right, because no one could. You don’t get what you deserve, you get what you get, and then if what you get’s good, you work your way towards deserving it. If what you get’s lousy, you work your way towards getting something better. Jack’s been dealt a mixed bag, but Gil’s his good thing, his too-good thing, his you’ll-never-deserve-this thing. He tries to keep his breakdowns over it to once a year, and Gil is always good about accepting the same litany of apologies, and reminding him he’s already made his amends, but this is not his regularly scheduled breakdown.

Jack shifts until he has his arms around Gil’s knees, face pressed more firmly into his lap just for a moment.

“I know… I know I always talk about how much you need me...but I need you. I need you more.”

“Was it a sad song?” He winds a curl around one finger, then smooths Jack’s hair out. “The one you said made you think of me?”

“No. No, just… pulled out of me, you ever get that feeling?”

“Oh, sure.”

“Not every song knows what love is. They, uh, all pretend to… but it’s… overblown kids’ stuff. It’s not… like looking at the man you wake up next to every morning and thinking he’s beautiful, and you know he’s beautiful, because you, well you wake up next to him every morning, and things don’t surprise you anymore, except of course things still surprise you. _All_ the things you know still surprise you. And they don’t. And you look at this beautiful man, who surprises you, and doesn’t, and you know everything wrong with yourself that he doesn’t deserve to put up with, and so does he, and you decide not to let it be his problem. You decide to be what he deserves, whether or not it’s possible-- it isn’t. And you know… it’s… There’s overblown kids’ stuff. There’s dramatics. Sure. Seven years, twenty-one years, I still… I still get struck, by you. And I wasn’t supposed to get this lucky. But I’ll take it. And the rest of it is just patterns. When you’re not suddenly surprised by the same man you’ve slept next to for a year or ten or twenty, you’re just… making breakfast. Getting stressed about work. Making dinner. Getting stressed about everything else. But… next to someone. _Next_ to someone. And I thought I wouldn’t get to be in love, really. And now I am and I still don’t know how to tell the world, but sometimes, sometimes I want to, even if it’s frightening. And I, uh, owe you promises still. I owe you a better man. And I’d like another twenty-one years, and another after that. That’s all.”

“That sounds nice.” Gil yawns. “Take me to bed?”

Jack rises, and Gil rises, and Jack hefts him up over his shoulder as if he earnestly believed it to be the request, and carries him to their room, to their bed, where he won’t have an easier time really explaining, but he’s explained enough for one exhausted night. They brush their teeth, they change for bed. He's living in a fairy tale he's never going to deserve, but Gil is always going to disagree on that point. Gil's the type to believe in fairy tales.

“I still get struck by you.” Jack says, as he pulls back the covers. 

“You still thrill me.” Gil slides under them.

For tonight… what else do they need?


End file.
